[BB_Eye]

Raising corporate tax rates, income tax rates and inheritance tax rates to Wilson era levels and introducing a 100% bonus tax would have been a very good start given that it would all come down hard on the very people that got us into this shambles in the first place. The banks, the financial sector and the upper middle-classes overwhelmingly responsible for overextending their credit during the housing bubble. If that doesn't give you a government surplus, I don't know what will.

Then reduce government expenditure not by cutting frontline services, but by radically cutting down the number of administrators in the NHS, abolishing PFI's (the coalition government has has increased them), capping local authority wages, closing Foundation Hospitals and private care services and bringing them back under direct NHS control and renationalising the railways (government spending on rail transport has paradoxically doubled since they were privatised).